Saturday, September 1, 2012

Orwell unleashed at Tampa-tempest-in-a Tea-Party!

The sound of an only slightly muffled, embarrassed but unmistakable laugh that accompanied Romney's ridicule of President Obama's promise to try to lower the level of the oceans and to try to cool the planet will ripple around the globe for decades.
If Romney's ridicule of Obama's commitment to the planet's need for oceans that do not rise and continents that do not overheat was endorsed by the Republican crowd in Tampa on Thursday night, as there is no doubt it was, then we witnessed, tragically, the triumph of narcissism, denial and hubris at that political convention.
The lies and half-truths and deceptions from all the speakers, including both Christy and Ryan, pale in comparison with the cultural denial of global warming, climate change and the ravages both of these forces are already bringing to the planet, and the people living on it.
It is not an exaggeration to characterize the Republican convention as one of ostriches, head-in-sand birds whose wealth, and world view and even now religious dogma are so hubristic (and held in such a self-righteous tenacity) as to be able and willing, with impunity, to deny science, to deny a woman's right to choose, to deny the place for humility in foreign policy (Condolessa Rice: "You cannot lead from behind!") to deny the need for food stamps, to deny the need for both the Health Reform Act, Roe v Wade, and to deny the need to nurture and grow an authentic middle class and to deny the truth of America's rebuilt international respect, over the last four years of the Obama leadership.
In fact, touting "leadership" by the Republicans is nothing short of Orwellian, in whose Nineteen Eighty-four, words mean precisely the opposite of their original definition.
Masquerading as "macho" hard-power advocates, determined not to cut the pentagon budget, but willing to eliminate both food and health care from the country's most impoverished, while also reducing the taxes of the rich, fundamentally pits the "pit-bulls" against all the moderates.
I have written previously that other presidential elections seemed to be a referendum on masculinity, with Gore v Bush, in 2000, and Kerry v Bush in 2004, and even Obama v McCain in 2008, but 2012 is similar and different.
Every interview with a Republican surrogate on American television during and following the "Tampa tempest-in-a-Tea-Party" has found that surrogate yelling, talking over the interviewer, protesting throughout the unreliability of the assumptions of the questions being asked. There has not been an exchange of interpretations on the facts but rather a shouting match about the "truth".
When anyone protests too much, we all know what that means. It inevitably means that they are not connected to the truth and will do anything, including becoming desperate to defend their lies, their misinformation and their kind of political warfare, which now includes social and political bullying.
When George W. and Cheney et al lied about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and had Ms Rice complicitous in warning of a "nuclear cloud" that could befall the world if the U.S. did not invade, when they knew they were perpetrating the greatest and most epic lie in modern political history, and when the then president's brother, Jeb, addressing the recent "tampa-Tea-party" exonerated Dubya as courageous and blunt to the audience's delight, we could all see how deeply the current Republican party had become addicted to its own Kool-Aid, and that drink has, and will continue to, poison the political climate in the U.S. for decades, if not forever.
In Orwell's novel, "war is peace" is the kind of new "think" and newspeak.
In the Republican party, "war is prosperity" and that championed by none other than Jesus Christ as the prosperity gospel, is the kind of new theocracy, evoking the Orwellian newspeak.
McCain would have the U.S. engaged in at least four or five foreign countries, "leading the world" by demonstrating the gospel of American values at the end of an AK-47, a Cruise Missile, or even a Drone and the crowd ate it like Snickers bars.
Just as the U.S. people have become addicted to the sugar additives in their food choices, the Republican party has become addicted to the lies of a world view that cannot be sustained or even defended by the facts on the ground, in virtually any file.
We have created a virtual universe, digitally, and the Republican party has moved into that universe, with its acquiescence to a Mormon candidate who is a "good and decent man" according to his formerly Episcopalian wife, even though the two theologies are totally incompatible, with its clinging to the narrowness and the reductionisms of a Ryan-Romney budget that would enrich the rich and disown the poor and the underclass, that would throw women, Latino's and Blacks under the bus, and emasculate the public education system, through a commitment to "choice" for parents, removing the ordinary students in favour of American "exceptionalism" in those schools that meet that set of criteria.
Under Romney, the new American theology, ideology and political correctness is American exceptionalism and anyone who does not drink the drink is "against us."
Just as Mitch McConnell declared his sole purpose as "ensuring Obama was a one-term president, so too Romney-Ryan have drunk their own Kool-Aid, fashioned on the night of Obama's inauguration, to the decimation of the public interest and Obama's presidency, while celebrating their personal career narcissism and emasculating the U.S. government's capacity to deal with the crisis that their kind inflicted on the U.S. and the rest of the world in 2008, by their own kind of chicanery.